Is It Just Me? (20 page)

Brill!
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sings
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‘If I could turn back time –’

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singing
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‘If I could find a way –’

Do you remember my famous Cher impression?

I do. I just wish you hadn’t decided it was appropriate to demonstrate it during a university interview. Let’s not dwell.

So do we go on elegant Tuscan retreats? Because surely one of the best things about being an adult must be holidaying on your own. Going on holi-bobs with your parentals is just horrifico.

It wasn’t that bad, was it? We had some fun.

What is fun about sitting in a caravan for seven days every year from the ages of ten to fifteen in the pouring rain in Cornwall, finishing a 1,000 piece puzzle of a warship? Then on the one day in five years there was sunshine, being subjected to the most horrific scene ever. How can you not remember THAT moment on the beach?

The moment your parents decided to free themselves and ‘go nudist’.

‘Look at us being European – such fun!’ they cried as they skipped towards the sea. That isn’t a sight you are ever prepared for. And while the skipping towards the sea was one thing; the return skip was quite another. They then got arrested for flashing and we had to spend the night in a Cornish cell, en famille.

And that was just English holidaymaking. Going abroad was even worse. If they didn’t understand the menu in a restaurant, Mum and Dad would shun the phrase book and rather imperiously ask, ‘Do you have a SHEPHERD’S PIE, then? SHEPHERD’S PIE? SHEPHERD’S PIE?!’ louder and louder, in their big booming English voices.

How about the one with the teen romance? That was lovely.

No, it wasn’t. Even that went full-on wrong. We were in Spain, and this gorge Spanish boy came over and asked me to have a mocktail with him by the pool. I was wearing my tiny denim short shorts
à la
Jennifer Grey in
Dirty Dancing
. Because I was all thin and leggy then. Unlike YOU, you big giant fatty.

RUDE.

Little
Sis had helped me put on lots of After Sun because she said it was important my legs had a sexy, smooth, silky glow for such a major occasion. So I went to meet this boy at the bar looking hot to trot. I hopped up casually onto the plastic bar stool next to him, but because I was slathered with so much lotion, I promptly slid off it again. I tried again, managed to sit, then moved forward to flirtatiously sip my mocktail and I slid straight off again. Sis said I looked like Morph from Tony Hart. And totally deranged. Nightmare.

You just couldn’t get a purchase on that stool
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sniggers
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Do you mind? These are recent and traumatic memories for me. I’ll never forget the way Juan flip-flopped back to his friends in a mix of fear and pity. No wonder my life goes in a sitcom.

MDRC, the bar-stool-falling experience was a useful store from that point of view.

If you think Spain was bad, do you remember Turkey?

Oh, no. Turkey. I am not sure we should tell that one.

Well, you seem to enjoy telling your Dear Reader Chum absolutely everything about our life, so why stop now?

OK, but let me just put out a disclaimer as this story also involves poo. Apologies in advance.

Right, so we were on a school trip camping in Turkey – my Geography class and a class from the local boys’ school. The campsite was quite basic: the loos were in wooden cubicles with no flush, so ‘stuff’ was just left there. (There were no hand dryers and wicker baskets here
.
) By the final day, let’s just say it was getting quite full and pretty grim actually.

On the last evening, Biffo was in the queue behind me. And, as you know, I well fancied Biffo and Clare-Bear said I was in with a chance. She could tell by the way he looked at me in the water polo game.

I went into the loo cubicle and did a big poo, but it was really showing because there was now a pile of debris quite near the top of the loo. I told you – disgusting. I thought I couldn’t have Biffo coming in there and seeing that, because he’d know it was me, and then he’d never fancy me.

Can I apologise to any readers who are, like me, feeling quite sick. Carry on, Little M.

For some reason I thought that the right thing to do was to roll up my poo in the loo roll and throw it out of the hatch at the back of the cubicle. But what I didn’t realise as I threw it out was that Biffo had since stopped queuing and had gone round the back of the toilet to pee in the bushes, and my flying, rolled-up poo in a toilet roll landed right by him. He screamed and shouted, ‘Someone has just thrown a shit at me!’ and everyone gathered outside the cubicle to see who it had been. I had no choice but to come out.

Weirdly, no one believed my excuse that a bird had swooped in and stolen the poo. It was so traumatic. Biffo pulled a face not dissimilar to Juan’s the year before.

Please, please tell me that we have fun holidays at some point in our life? I don’t care about the hang-gliding and dare-devilling any more, I just want to have a not totally and completely horrendo time.

We do take ourselves on some lovely trips, I promise. But it’s not all plain sailing. Don’t panic, there’s no more poo-throwing or getting arrested or falling off bar stools (well, maybe a little bit of that. Is it just me who has a complex relationship with the bar stool?), but holidaymaking does present its own set of annoyances, I rather find.

MDRC, let me turn to you for a moment, to see if you agree. The first major headache is all the holiday administration or ‘holi-min’ – a costly and destructive business. For example, there is the fact that before going on holiday you decide you need a lovely new wicker beach bag and a sarong, conveniently forgetting that you decide this every single time you go on holiday, meaning that by the age of thirty-five, the average British woman (by which I mean me) owns at least twenty-three sarongs and fourteen beach bags. And is it just me who
always
forgets to take the electric socket adapter thing? So that I have to buy
another
adapter for £17 at the airport? I have fifty-six of them in a cupboard at home.

Ditto travel pillows. I buy them at the airport thinking they look good: ‘Oooh, yes, lovely – I’ll definitely have that for the journey. I’ll sleep like a new-born babe, carried aloft on a cloud.’ Then I get on the plane and realise that a) I’ll look like a massive tit trying to blow it up in a crowded aeroplane, b) it’s probably incredibly uncomfortable and, c) the only people who seem to be able to pull them off are sixty-six, called Jean, are heavily into giant Puzzler crosswords and are going on a ‘jaunt’ from Guildford. They have no shame in wandering around the plane with it still attached to their neck. I find that unnerving. Are they sleepwalking?

I have thirty-four unopened travel pillows making merry with fifty-six plug adapters, twenty-three sarongs and fourteen beach bags in my holi-cupboard at home.

Then there’s the actual being-in-transit aspect of the whole holiday business. I’m not a fan of the over packed, over crowded hustle bustle of the holiday plane, train, or automobile. Plane-wise what I fear most (and what inevitably always happens), is being seated in the middle seat next to a large sleeping male, and finding myself desperately needing the toilet. A few nudges and he doesn’t wake. You’re in economy, you’re completely trapped, and so your only option seems to be to mount him from the side and clamber over. The last time I attempted this manoeuvre, the man woke up as I was directly facing him, in the mount position. Slightly awkward all round. What does one do? I cheerily said ‘Hello!’ and carried on. Of course, by the time I got back from the loo he was asleep again, and I was forced to remount. I was remounting (sorry, I will stop saying
mounting
) just as there was a spot of turbulence, which caused me to lose my grip on the headrest, and crash down heavily into his lap. What made this far worse was that he didn’t seem to mind.

Still, it’s worth it when you get there. Feeling that surge of heat hit you as you walk off the plane. I love that feeling. Suddenly, the To Do list seems far, far away, especially if there’s any kind of hotel stay involved. I do love a hotel room: adore it. What’s not to love about everything you need in one room? Would you have a kettle on a tea tray with biscuits in a packet in your bedroom at home? No, you very likely wouldn’t. And – please excuse me, MDRC, I’m getting a little giddy here – the kettle. The little tiny kettle on a little tiny stand! Admittedly it’s hard to fill as it never quite fits under the basin taps, but that’s all just part of the fun.

Then there’s room service. I’ve now mastered the art of room service, if I do say so myself. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the idea of a stranger coming to your room with a tray of food tremendously exciting. You’ll probably over-order because you kind of want a bit of everything, but let’s call it curiosity. To avoid looking greedy, this is what I do (a hot tip for any other single travellers, from me to you with love): when I hear the knock on the door, I quickly put the shower on in the bathroom and close the bathroom door. Then, as the waiter comes in with the overloaded tray (sometimes two trays are needed, often a trolley), I’ll shout in the vague direction of the bathroom, ‘Don’t worry, darling, stay there; I’ll get the room service!’ Do you see? Clever. Thereby insinuating that there’s a man in the bathroom with a huge appetite, and it’s not just old Mrs Greedy-guts herself ordering all the pies. The only downside is that you must then spend the rest of the week making up excuses as to why your husband or lover isn’t joining you on various excursions. (It often turns out your husband or lover is an albino agoraphobic who only comes on holiday to order room service. And, given that, who’d deny him a steak sandwich and an ice-cream sundae of a morning? That’s right. No one. It would be very cruel indeed. High five me for that tip. Thank you.)

No matter how wonderful your hotel room is, you will at some point want to leave it. And you may well find yourself heading for the sea. Now, I love the sea. I love bobbing about on it, in it and lying around watching it. The sea and its timelessness, its gentle in-and-out lapping which slows one’s very breathing . . . excuse me, I’ve gone a little poetic. However, beaches with all their beach-min provide many a mini life hurdle (and what a lovely phrase ‘many a mini’ is, if I do say so myself) so I think it can only be but time for one of my lists. Oh, yes. It gives me great pleasure to present you with:

Or rather, putting one’s towel down on the sand to establish one’s ‘beach station’, at the precise moment when a gust of wind rudely chooses to blow it back in one’s face. You then can’t see briefly and stand inadvertently on a child’s sandcastle, who then cries and their parents think you did it deliberately.

I like to imagine that I’ll go for a short and refreshing dip, before emerging gracefully from the sea perfectly flushed from the exercise, lithe and toned, hair smoothed elegantly back (like Ursula Andress, minus the scary knife). What actually happens is I hobble in (having stood on a pointy shell), make embarrassing ‘Ooh, ooh, aaah, it’s cold’ noises, hop screaming away from what I thought was a jellyfish (but is actually a plastic bag), start swimming, panic about being pulled out to sea by a ‘rip tide’ (even though I don’t quite know what a ‘rip tide’ is), do a crazy rushed breast stroke back in, hitting a sand bank not realising it had got shallow, and emerge from the water shivering, sand covered, my hair plastered to my face like a crazed sea creature. I then walk back to my towel picking my swimming costume out of my bum and removing a bit of seaweed from somewhere you never want seaweed. Sexy.